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ISSN 1923-1563[Online]
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Studies in Literature and Language
Vol. 7, No. 2, 2013, pp. 59-62
DOI:10.3968/j.sll.1923156320130702.2761
Edgar Allan Poe and His Detective Fictions
XU Wenru[a],*
[a]
attended the University of Virginia and served in the
military, Poe left the couple. He published his first
anthology “Tamerlane” (1821) at his own expense and
embarked on his writing career from then on. Although
Poe became so famous in his life time, he could never get
rid of poverty. The death of his wife Virginia depressed
Poe so deeply that he died two years later. His life
experience deeply influences his writing. Poe’s short
fictions and poems which always spread with pessimistic
even murderous atmosphere are access to his most
exemplary writing, entry into his uniquely terrifying
world, and intriguing connections to facets of their
author’s tragically disordered life.
School of Foreign Studies, Shandong University of Finance and
Economics, Ji’nan, China.
*
Corresponding author.
Received 20 June 2013; accepted 26 September 2013
Abstract
Edgar Allan Poe is the originator of the modern detective
fictions. His detective fictions, only five, but were
translated into many different languages. As a poet with
aesthetic tendencies, he uses horror and thriller to cause
readers’ aesthetic pleasure and tries to blend aesthetic
appeal to popular culture in an experimental writing style
which has a significant impact on the later Conan Doyle,
Agatha Christie’s detective fictions. In the background
of theoretical prosperity, Poe’s detective fictions have
aroused many critics’ attention from new criticism to
psychoanalysis, poststructuralism and other perspectives.
Key words: Edgar Allan Poe; Detective fiction;
Writing style; Aesthetic appeal
1. TRADITIONAL DETECTIVE FICTIONS
AND THEIR MODES
Poe created a story set in Paris (The Murder in the
Rue Morgue) in 1841, so the detective fictions rapidly
became a very popular literary genre in America, Britain
and France to a lesser extent. The genre is most of time
relegated to the category of low fiction, but actually is a
durable literary form that has proven extremely flexible
and creative. It is such an especially valuable literature
that attracts so much attention from critics. Detective
fictions’ structure is to some extent very explicit. The
basic premise of all detective fictions is that a society is
ordered, real, but the result of the crime causes the society
disordered. Under normal circumstances, a hero arrives—
a legal staff, private detective or amateur sleuth—through
hard work and luck, or through logical reasoning, to
solve the crime, identify the perpetrators, and the social
order is restored. In more recent times, especially in
postmodernist novels, the latter few steps may not always
occur, or sometimes the detection becomes a puzzle. In
the detective fictions, the main thread is the criminal casesolving. The two sides of conflict are the detective who
always represents justice and the criminal who represents
XU Wenru (2013). Edgar Allan Poe and His Detective Fictions. Studies
in Literature and Language, 7 (2), 59-62. Available from: http://www.
cscanada.net/index.php/sll/article/view/j.sll.1923156320130702.2761
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/j.sll.1923156320130702.2761
INTRODUCTION
The British holds that the patent right of invention of
detective fictions should belong to them, but actually,
an American named Edgar Allan Poe had finished five
detective short stories between 1841 and 1845 which were
imbued with the basic traits of defective fictions. He is
therefore regarded as “originator of detective fiction” in
public reading.
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts.
His parents died when he was a small child and he was
informally adopted by Allan couple. Having shortly
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Copyright © Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture
Edgar Allan Poe and His Detective Fictions
the evil respectively. The motive of crime is usually
concerned with property, love, position, or fame. To some
extent, the detective fictions possess the positive social
significance and critical spirit. The detective fictions of
excellence are concretely and smoothly structured which
is unexpected as well as reasonable. At the same time, the
detective fiction writers always insist “Literature is about
human nature”, so in the fictions of Conan Doyle, Agatha
Christie and other famous writers, both the detective and
the criminal are depicted so vividly and have the strong
characteristics. The detection of the criminal case which
is based upon the scientific facts inspires the reader to
deduct on the basis of their own learning while reading, so
the process of reading becomes an intelligence test. The
writers always try their best to design difficult plots to
attract readers’ attention which results in the duel between
the criminal and the detective that is also between the
writer and the reader. The content is mixed together with
much information from different scientific areas, such as
physics, chemistry, geography, and history which readers
can absorb to improve their mode of thinking and elevate
their minds while intensifying their emotional reactions.
clue. The process of murdering and reasoning runs
through the story from beginning to the end. He uses the
technique of reasoning successfully. Firstly, excluding
all the impossible elements, the rest are facts. Secondly,
if the criminal details are more bizarre, the detection is
much easier and also the conclusion is more simple. Poe
considers that the fact never “lies at the bottom of a well”.
The really important fact must be superficial. The truth is
not in the tip of a horn but where we only raise our heads.
The murderer usually grasps this kind of psychology
and purposely makes a mystery of simple things, but the
conclusion is usually unexpectedly simple. Nobody can
expect that the murderer is an orangutan in The Murders
in the Rue Morgue and the stolen letter is just under
everyone’s eyes in The Purloined Letter. The strategy
will be used in many detective fictions especially in the
works of Conan Doyle, whose description of details and
characters’ psychology is more exquisite compared with
Poe. Then, evidence of his contributions lay not only in
his employment of the detective’s narrator, a Dr. Watsonlike man who relays information to the reader, but also in
the creation of some famous characters like C. Auguste
Dupin (The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery
of Marie Roget, and The Purloined Letter) and William
Legrand (The Gold Bug). Dupin is a descendent of a
famous French family. He can only live on his heritage,
for his succeeding failures in his career. He likes reading
books, dreaming and thinking about problems silently
in the dark night, particularly curious about the doubtful
case in everyday life. Decoding the suspense becomes
his favorite. He has already possessed the analytical and
deductive abilities which a detective is supposed to have.
In order to set off Dupin’s resourcefulness, Poe creates a
character which is a stupid-looking and self-opinionated
journalist. Dupin is nearly forgotten today, but his spirit
lives on in the most of famous and successful detectives
like Sherlock Holmes. As Watson is to remark “You
remind me of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin.” Dupin is to
strongly influence Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create the
famous detective Sherlock Holmes.
Poe creates five different kinds of criminal patterns
through five detective fictions. The Murders in the Rue
Morgue is full of suspense. The crime happens in an
airtight house. It is hard to guess how the murderer an
orangutan enters the room. The result is surprising. The
detective excludes all the possibilities and finds the facts
by induction, deduction and some other reasoning methods
which prove that the setting of plot is extremely wellorganized. In The Gold Bug, the criminal is exposed by
decoding the suspense. The process of decoding applies a
lot of mathematical operations and number’s permutations
and combinations and the design of plot-setting is covered
by a magic color. The Purloined Letter exposes a mistake
which is easiest to be made for detective story—The most
obvious thing is also the easiest to be overlooked. It also
proves the conclusion—If the details of a case are more
2. POE AND HIS DETECTIVE FICTIONAL
PATTERNS
Poe’s writing style is weird and decadent full of smooth
and concrete writing skills and musical language. He
insists that producing works of art is a purely subjective
process of thinking, needlessly reflects any type of real
life, and always emphasizes that pure art must give people
aesthetic enjoyment. He champions art for art’s sake
(before the term itself was coined). He is consequentially
an opponent of didacticism. Poe’s technique of expression
is always related with the dark and horrible corpse robber
or some kind of monstrous doom atmosphere which hints
that the dying can back to life or the soul can drift around
us. All of these represent that he has an eccentric and
morbid character. He was an advocate and supporter of the
literary magazine. He felt “short story” or “tales” in the
early nineteenth century which were usually considered as
vulgar art, along with the magazines that published them
were in fact the legitimate art forms with the novel or epic
poems. He insists on the artistic value of the short story
which is influential in the short story’s rise to prominence
in later generations. His short fictions are usually divided
into two categories—detective fictions and horror fictions.
A group of detective fictions produced by this abnormal
writer are The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The
Mystery of Marie Roget (1842), The Gold Bug (1843),
The Purloined Letter (1844), Thou Art the Man (1844).
The success of these five fictions can be proved
from four aspects. Firstly, Poe is the first writer who
produces the defective fiction consciously. He takes the
detection and reasoning as theme and murder as main
Copyright © Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture
60
XU Wenru (2013).
Studies in Literature and Language, 7 (2), 59-62
bizarre, the detection is easier and also the conclusion is
more simple. In The Mystery of Marie Roget, the trick
of murdering is also revealed by reasoning. In Thou
Art the Man, the truth is found out by a psychological
tactics which is asking a dead person to speak. In the five
fictions, the detective firstly gives a hypothesis based on a
thorough analysis of the murderer’s psychological reaction
and endurance and then proves his hypothesis by applying
many flexible psychological strategies to solve the case.
These criminal and detective patterns provide future
detective fictions with many different modes of writing
and make them become more mature in all aspects.
Finally, Poe makes up the detective story in the way of
reasoning and psychological description. In Poe’s stories,
the murderous atmosphere is constructed so strongly that
the reader feels as if he is participating. He relates the
criminal acts with human’s greed nature and puts forward
a very important researching topic—motive of crime. We
can call Edgar Allan Poe “originator of detective fiction”
and he fully deserves this honor, though interestingly,
Poe himself never admits. He only treats these five short
fictions as his works of play. As a writer who insists on
the pure art, he never considers the detective story-writing
so meaningful, but his influence is still profound and
lasting in the history of detective fictions.
and frightening images. All of these writing techniques
and thinking modes help Poe to design so many different
ways of murder and construct different kinds of horrible
atmosphere. All of the elements he employs in his
fictions and poems—delight, horror, fantasy, learning,
suspense establish him to be an outstanding writer with
dreamlike magic power. The common and basic principle
of Poe’s writing is that the writer should try to create
a spiritual effect upon the reader. “There are no extra
elements in Poe, no subplots, no minor characters, and
no digressions except those that show the madness of
deranged first-person (‘I’) narrators” (retrieved from
internet). “Ultimately, Poe took writing to be a moral
task that worked not through teaching lessons, but in
simultaneously stimulating his readers’ mental, emotional,
and spiritual faculties through texts of absolute integrity”
(Edgar Allan Poe).
3.2 Poe’s Political Stance
The later appearing “father of detective fiction” Conan
Doyle and “queen of detective fiction” Agatha Christie are
all under the influence of Edgar Allan Poe. Actually, his
appearance in literary history is not accidental. Poe lived
in the south of America where the slavery was defended
stubbornly. The writer himself also supports slavery
which influences his writing deeply. For example, Chinese
scholar argues that in The Murders in the Rue Morgue,
3. POE’S AESTHETIC THEORIES AND
HIS DETECTIVE FICTIONAL WRITING
Poe’s ambivalence towards the beast and his obedience to
the invisible rule of “political correctness” under the social
circumstances in 19th century USA, marked by the notorious
tradition of racial discrimination against African-Americans,
who were and are alluded as apes, betray the subtle interrelation
between literature and politics at the time. Poe, generally
regarded an aesthete in art and a liberal in social life, was
always torn apart between rationalism and irrationalism, reality
and fantasy, and the conservative and the radical. That Poe took
passive cynicism as an ideology and was ironically forced to
face social phenomena while unconsciously exposing them was
no exception in the “tale of ratiocination”, a genre of “escapist
literature” as it was and is (Yuan, 2012, p.62).
3.1 Poe’s Aesthetic Theories
Most of the elements used in Poe’s horror fictions and
poems affect his detective fictional writing deeply. The
mysticism Poe praises highly and his dark and horrible
writing style help his detective fictions even more
mysterious. His success attributes to his talents not only
in detective fictions but another two. The content of
these fictions and poems is always concerned with the
abnormal psychology and the situation of decadent and
death. He said “the unity of effect or impression is a point
of the greatest importance” (Poe, 2004, p.586). He tries
to raise the funny to the weird, the scared to the horrible,
and the strange to the mysterious. All he wants to prove
is that evil is always the original motif in people’s hearts.
Certainly, in such a society that the criminal offences are
rampant, Poe’s detective fictions are not out of concern
for the care of social problems, but for the interest in the
description of psychological behaviors and mysterious
incidents that we can find in his horror fictions. The
writing skills and viewpoints in these two kinds of fictions
complement each other to reach a unity. Poe’s “pure
poems” he called is also composed by the weird and
morbid images completely giving us a kind of pessimistic
feeling. In “Raven”, his representative poem, he chooses
this ominous bird to express his extremely sorrow and
despair. The poem is rich with musical phrases, sensuous
Among the representatives of American Renaissance
writers, only Poe comes from the Old South, but the
places, characters and themes in his works often transcend
time and space constraints, not easy to paste the South
or American regional labels. While his contemporaries
Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, etc. often use
American natural scenery as the background of their
works which reflects the awakening national and ethnic
consciousnesses. Most people think that Poe’s ideas and
creation get rid of the shackles of social politics, ideology
and economical situation reaching a height of pure
aesthetics. however , Poe’s identities as employed editor
and professional writer made him maintain a close contact
with the sensitive and popular subjects in the American
society. His decadent and pessimistic mood spreading all
over his fictions and poems just reflects the sentiments
of the declining classes of southern society. His cynicism
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Copyright © Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture
Edgar Allan Poe and His Detective Fictions
CONCLUSION
ideology (Zizek, 2002, p.40) and his yearning to be a
“pure” poet and writer always contradict to the point that
he cannot describe the integral human in his works.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “art for art’s sake” aesthetic theory
and literary practice cannot escape from social, economical,
political, cultural and ideological bondage and influence.
Poe as an employed editor, critic, and professional writer
maintained a close contact with the racial trauma and ethnic
identity crisis which situated in the American cultural center
in the 19th century. His works uses and deconstructs the
pop cultural forms in the cultural market as well as reflects
the horror and violence of slavery society in the form of
horror fictions and detective fictions. When Poe parodies
the racist stereotypes and clichés, he actually challenges
and subverts the pure racial concept. In the detective fiction
The Murders in the Rue Morgue and horror fiction Black
Cat, Poe employs the image of animal to represent the
slaves. He actually tries to evaluate the social divisional
attitudes of slavery from a relatively more objective
viewpoint and explore American political culture from the
deep psychological perspective showing a cautious attitude
towards the emancipation of the slaves. Poe reminded white
Americans wary of slavery and the abolitionist movement,
showing his conservative political views.
Poe, the most controversial and most understood writer in
the literacy history, left us a great deal of literature legacy
(Hayes, 2004, p.85). In the one hundred and fifty years
time after Poe’s death, there are numerous controversies
surrounding him. Especially after World War II, western
criticism entered the times of pluralism, Poe is always
the beloved of many critical discourses including readerresponse criticism, psychoanalysis, new criticism, and
postmodernism (like metaphysical detective fictions)
(Nicol, 2009, p.164). Almost all the theoretical discourses
benefit from Poe’s text. More worthy of our attention is
that Poe creates a new style of detective fictions which
has a significant impact on the later Conan Doyle, Agatha
Christie’s novels.
Modern literature suggests that the distinction between
high literature and low literature should be cancelled,
especially in the postmodernist literature, like The Name
of Rose by Eco, the author usually parodies some so
called low fictions like detective fictions, science fictions
and romantic novels, etc or picks up some messages from
them as their tools to deconstruct or subvert the traditional
values even the whole world, so detective fictions or some
other popular genres of fiction have taken much more
notice than before. A century and a half after his death,
Edgar Allan Poe is instantly identifiable and remains
immensely enjoyable.
3.3 Poe’s Aesthetic Appeal
Poe’s detective novels have a dual nature: on the one
hand, he maintains a critical attitude of the mainstream
culture for his elite consciousness; On the other hand,
adapt to the consumer culture, his detective fictions can be
combined with the public experience and arouse readers’
pleasure. In this way, he tries to defend the author’s
autonomy and independence without ignoring the market.
It is the inherent tension between this bold and innovative
artistic experimentation and aesthetic concept of art that
gives Poe’s detective novels infinite charm.
For artistic creation process is also a production
process, readers’ acceptance and reaction constitutes
an important part in the literary production process.
Consumers’ free choices of the text force the author to pay
attention to reader’s horizon of expectations. Detective
fictions as a literary aesthetic form made for mass
consumption allow readers to the exposure of the aesthetic
production process and to be involved in imagination,
emotion, and aesthetic narrative construction. With the
aid of traditional Gothic novel’s popular elements like
suspense, murder and terror, Poe digs the detective fiction
as a self-sufficient aesthetic object and renders the form to
refresh his aesthetic ideal.
From some critics’ points of view, Poe’s detective
fictions are not concerned about material life but the
spiritual realm. He employs the popular form to convey
profound spiritual messages. In his detective fictions like
The Murders in the Rue Morgue, he provides only a purely
aesthetic judgment, rather than moral judgments to the
reader which is coincident with Poe’s aesthetic philosophy
and literature purport.
Copyright © Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture
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